Youth Quest

Call me a Geek? You’re welcome… but Google+ is gone open. Hmm… I know my friends and probably those that usually read The Youth Quest might say that I’ve turned geekish! But Hey! I think it’s worth knowing.Let me first quote someone and then we can put this to the board. In words of James: “Youth is the joy, the little bird that has broken out of the eggs and is eagerly waiting to spread out its wings in the open sky of freedom and hope.” Wednesday morning got me tempted to replace “...Open sky” with “open internet” but why the bother? It won’t do me justice in any case. So let me just get to the News. I woke up at around 6a.m trying to get ready to go for work and I was welcomed by a tweet that Google+ (Google plus) was just declared open to everyone. My first thought was Facebook fans, wondering how many will spread their wings and fly on the open net. Second thought was Twitter is losing members, considering that a vast number of my fellow youth may not have really gotten a chance to find out how it works having been too occupied with Facebook. So just for that purpose of making sure that everyone is aboard, I devoted to put together a few details on Google+ Small back ground. Bangalore, Jul 8/2011: “One of the basic laws of supply and demand is, “If demand increases and supply remains unchanged, then it leads to higher equilibrium price and quantity.” Now, it’s more applicable to the Google+ demand. Millions around the globe are dying hard to get a Google+ Invitation, but Google is still keeping silent about the launch date”. “Google’s previous social attempts have been unmitigated train wrecks, if we’re being completely honest. Open Social failed because Google couldn’t get Facebook and other social networks to buy into the idea of a shared social identity. Google Wave missed the target by not being useful enough to attract any users. Google Buzz freaked people out by naively overstepping its bounds on privacy. So, when Google unveiled its latest social experiment last week — called Google+ — I was extremely sceptical. Still, Facebook is so malignant in terms of privacy and such a mess to use and configure that I was more than happy to give Google+ a try. I just expected that it would be a speed-dating relationship like most of my product reviews and destined to last no more than a few weeks at the most.” techrepublic.com. Current Ground. Google’s engineering boss Vic Gundotra tells it like social networks had yet to be invented: “We believe online sharing is broken. And even awkward ... We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid. They force us into buckets — or into being completely public ... Real life sharing is nuanced and rich. It has been hard to get that into software.” This comes after one having to first be invited (you would still have to be a member of or a CEO of an IT company or a relation to such) to join Google+ for the past nearly three months. However, its official company blog announced about 99 improvements that have been made to the product since launching, Vic Gundotra wrote, “We’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100th feature: open signups.” Today’s (Wednesday) update also comes with big improvements to Google+ Hangouts, including the ability to use them on Android devices (version 2.3 and higher). It also includes search, which is a hybrid of content shared on Google+ and results from around the web. “Just type what you’re looking for into the Google+ search box, and we’ll return relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web,” Do you already feel like there are simply too many social networks you have to manage? Wait till you read the plus points: “...the most attractive part is how easy it is to find, add, and organize your friends (I cited that as the main reason you won’t hate Google+). The friend issue is the heart of all social networks, although it’s so obvious that it’s often overlooked. In fact, Twitter still isn’t very good at it, Facebook is a little better, but both of them now look like neophytes compared to the way Google+ does it. The friend feature on Google+ is called “Circles,” and it turns out to be an intuitive mashup of friending (from Facebook) and following (from Twitter). Circles are basically sets of friends that you can drag and drop into groups, mirroring your existing social circles — Family & Friends, Colleagues, Local Techies, etc. — rather than just the one big lump of friends you have on Facebook that can result in moments of “worlds colliding,” since you have to share all of your updates with all of your friends. On Google+, you can selectively send updates to different circles, and you can quickly click between the news streams of your different circles. You can also make circles for people you don’t necessarily know but are interested in following their updates (e.g. Tech Journalists, Famous Engineers, Web Celebrities, etc.). This is where Google+ echoes Twitter, because people don’t have to follow you back in order for you to add them to one of your Circles. At that point, you’ll see all of their public updates, and most of these folks make the majority of their updates public in order to be seen by more people (it’s the whole social media narcissism meme, and it has already transplanted itself on Google Plus). The real killer feature to Circles in Google+ is how easy it is to find and add friends. Everywhere you see a user’s name or avatar you can simply mouse over it, click “Add to Circles,” and then select which circle to add them to. On Twitter, it took me about three years to find about 200 really interesting people (mostly in technology and the media) worth following. It took me less than three days to find that many on Google Plus. Of course, most of them are the same people, so Google+ has the advantage of speed by letting us quickly re-coagulate our existing social graph on the new service. So call me a geek if you like… but tweeting and Facebook at the same time! I think is worth trying. And for Youth Quest fans, I couldn’t help but write this... feel free to call it The Youth Quest on the Net and see you next time on Google+. Ends